The Boxer's Omen

I really don't remember ever seeing in a movie an actor devouring food, then throwing it up and the colleague sitting next to him grabbing the vomit and finishing it with gusto – all that without a cut, in one continuous shot. Even a little detail like that just goes to show that Asians are, well, different. The legendary Shaw Brothers studio came up with a film that is a bit out of their league. It's partly a traditional martial arts story, but most of it is a big mess with occult, magical scenes, with gore elements that are interestingly stylized so you can't even take them seriously. The result is, in sum, a mix of traditional Western horror and Asian mysticism. There's so much crazy imagery that it's impossible to remember – tarantulas drinking squashed brains with straws, crocodiles attacking skulls, bats disintegrating, reptiles of various forms trying to be scary, statues coming to life, bodily metamorphoses of all kinds, etc. etc. In short, a round of applause for the director's imagination. The story is perhaps not even important, though there is a clumsy effort at one, and everything culminates in a twenty-minute WTF fight between two wizards over a rare Buddhist relic, in a style that is beyond my imagination. (2016-07-30)